re: Mizzou has been banned from the 2019-2020 Postseason

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How do they get tonked and North Carolina doesn’t

Or any of these basketball guys caught by the fbi

Just suspend the cheating players. Don’t kill the teams for this

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Auburn and Michigan both had scandals involving paper classes and they never got punished either. The problem is two-fold:

1. Independent study is a 100 percent legitimate thing. Much of my graduate work was done that way because my mentor was a Harvard educated hard-arse who was more qualified than anyone else to teach me (he was quite literally *the single authority in my field."). He created classes just for me and I worked harder academically in those than I have for anything else in my life. It's done less often at the undergraduate level but it still legitimately happens at a pretty common level (it's usually done for honors type students and those who want or need a very specialized course load).

2. What UNC did is something that could potentially cost them accreditation. UNC is a prestige school but even if they weren't, that's just not a door the NCAA wants to be the one to open. (Remember the NCAA is a conglomeration of universities and all of them want to keep that status at all costs).

UNC absolutely deserved to be put on probation by SACS (I've seen no-name schools get probation for less) but had the NCAA opened that door wider they might've been forced to pull their accreditation. (A school can re-gain accreditation but that's not something the NCAA wants to be responsible for.).

tl;dr version - an association of colleges whose main duty is to regulate sport doesn't want to be involved in a member school losing accreditation. NCAA will not investigate an issue that could very much damage or even destroy the member school completely just because the sports side of it got out of hand (and no accreditation threatens that).